Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (30 page)

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In London, early in 1980, Mary Austin had at last found Freddie the home of his dreams. When she sent him the spec of Garden Lodge in Logan Place, W8, a short, quiet residential street in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, just off his beloved Kensington High Street, Freddie fell in love with it on the spot.

Enclosed within lofty old brick walls topped with railings fortified by trellising, affording almost total privacy, only the pitched roof of the
two-storey, eight-bedroom gabled Edwardian property could be seen from the street. Unusually for that neighborhood, the house was set in an acre of mature landscaped gardens. The entrance was a nondescript dark green wooden door, which in years to come would be engraved with ever-changing graffiti by fans from all over the world.

The house had belonged to a member of the Hoare banking family, a gag not lost on Freddie, who rechristened it “the Whore House.” The asking price was more than half a million pounds. Freddie, unabashed, offered cash. As it was divided at the time into two separate residences, extensive renovation and conversion was required to restore it to one grand house. It would be years before Freddie could call the mansion “home.” It didn’t stop him boasting about it.

“I saw the house, fell in love with it, and within half an hour it was mine,” he told former pop writer Nina Myskow.

“It’s in a terrible state at the moment, with all the changes I’m having made. I won’t be able to move in for about a year. I call it my country house in town. It’s very secluded, with huge grounds, right in the middle of London. Once a month, I get inspired, and go there with the architect. ‘Why don’t we have this wall removed?,’ I ask. Everybody groans, and the architect dies. I went in there sloshed the other day, after a good lunch. There’s a wonderful bedroom area at the top—I’m having three knocked into one palatial suite. In this sort of haze, I said, inspired, ‘What would be nice is a glass dome over the top of all this bedroom area.’ The architect flinched, but went rushing back to his pen and drawing pad. I haven’t seen the sketches yet, but they’re on the way.”

Rick Sky heard about it in an interview for the
Daily Star
.

“I like to spend, spend, spend,” Freddie gushed. “Recently I bought a new house. I love buying antiques at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Sometimes I could go to Cartier’s, the jewelers, and buy up the whole shop. Often, my sprees begin just like a woman buying herself a new hat to cheer herself up. Some days, when I’m really fed up, I just want to lose myself in my money. I work up a storm and just spend and spend. Then
I get back home and think, Oh, God, what have I bought? But it’s never a waste. I get an awful lot of pleasure out of giving presents.”

Freddie confided to Ray Coleman of the
Daily Mirror
, “I don’t like life too easy. If I keep spending a lot, then I’ll have to keep earning it. That’s how I push myself. I drink a lot, smoke a lot, enjoy my wines and good food. And I will never again eat hamburgers.”

His obsession with his house, like most of his interests, was just another way to offset boredom.

“It is the biggest disease in the whole world,” Freddie admitted.

“Sometimes I think there must be more to life than rushing around the world like a mad thing, getting bored. But I can’t sit still for long. I’ve got all this nervous energy.

“You become accustomed to different things. Your standards and your expectations become higher. If you know you need constant entertainment, you make sure you have it. When I tell people what I’ve been up to, they’re amazed. But that’s all I know. It’s my way of having fun. That’s why I can’t sit down and read a book. I can read all the books in the world when it’s all over and my legs are in bandages. I may be just being greedy, but I’m an entertainer. It’s in the blood . . . I am just a trouper, dear. Give me a stage. But in a way you’ve created a monster, haven’t you. And you’re the one who has to live with it.”

Queen’s sixteenth single “Play the Game” emerged on 30 May 1980. Female fans were outraged by the toughened image flaunted by nailbrush-moustached Freddie in the video. Many bombarded the Queen offices with bottles of nail varnish. Despite the protests, the single still reached Number Fourteen.

Summer 1980 brought another US tour, this time a forty-six-date epic with every performance sold out. Queen’s ninth album,
The Game
, was released in the UK. Slated by the music press, it conquered the chart at Number One. In Vancouver, the fans who usually lobbed panties and blooms at their idol hurled disposable razors and blades. The moustache stayed on. John Deacon’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” for which the bassist played most of the instruments—bass, piano, rhythm and lead
guitars, note, no synth, with Roger later adding some drums and Brian some guitar and harmonizer—was released that August. Cruising to Number One on the US
Billboard
Hot 100, it lingered there for five more weeks. It also secured the top slot in Argentina, Guatemala, Mexico, and Spain, and reached Number Seven in the UK. The track is still credited as Queen’s best-selling single, with sales of over seven million copies. John credited the inspiration for its bass line to disco group Chic’s “Good Times.”

“Freddie sang until his throat bled,” commented Brian in
Mojo
magazine. “He was so into it. He wanted to make that song something special.”

The Game
became Queen’s first Number One album in America, exceeding all expectations. They ended their longest-ever tour with four sell-out nights at New York’s Madison Square Garden, reeling from the death of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham. Just thirty-two years old, Bonham choked to death on vomit, having downed forty shots of vodka in one day. His death that September killed another of Queen’s favorite bands.

It was during the 1980 tour that Freddie met his own personal Viking. Thor Arnold, a strapping blond nurse by day and darling of Manhattan’s downtown gay haunts by night, lived near Greenwich Village and picked Freddie up in one of the local clubs. While the affair was short-lived, they were to remain close friends until the end. The primary reason their friendship lasted was that Thor wanted nothing from his famous pal. If he decided on the spur of the moment to fly into another city and surprise Freddie at work, Thor would purchase his own ticket and put himself on the plane. This, to Freddie, was adorable, and he loved him for it. It was through Thor that Freddie met three other close Manhattan friends, Joe Scardilli, John Murphy, and Lee Nolan. These four soon became known as Freddie’s “New York Daughters,” and much hilarity was had whenever Freddie was in town.

A brief October holiday afforded not enough time to relax. If they could remember
how
to relax. With their tenth album, the
Flash Gordon
sound track, still to complete, their eighteenth single “Flash” was ready to go. There was a further European tour to prepare for, taking in three nights at Wembley Arena.

The death of John Lennon distracted them from all that. When he was gunned down outside his New York home in December, the celebrity fraternity was forced to confront its vulnerability. There were other Mark Chapmans out there: John Hinckley Jr., for example, who was obsessed with actress Jodie Foster, and who would attempt to assassinate US president Ronald Reagan in 1981. Queen had never paid much attention to security. This needed to change.

In a tribute to Lennon at their Wembley Arena show, Queen performed his 1971 hit “Imagine.” Never mind that Freddie forgot the lyrics and Brian lost track of the chords. The chorus was taken up by a sobbing throng of shocked and heartbroken fans.

Awards flooded in. Two Grammy nominations, for Best-Produced Album (
The Game
), and Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for “Another One Bites the Dust” (they lost to Bob Seger). “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “Another One Bites the Dust” both featured in the top five best-selling American singles list of 1980, the latter having shifted more than three and a half million copies. As the year concluded, and as Queen sat planning their New Year dates in Japan, they took stock. To date, they had sold more than 45 million albums and 25 million singles worldwide. They had made their debut as highest-paid company directors and as their own primary asset in
The Guinness Book of Records
. Bigger, better, never-been-done-before, was the brief. Where could a bunch of rock stars go from here?

16

We went to South America originally because we had been invited down. They wanted four wholesome lads to play some nice music. By the end of it I wanted to buy up the entire continent and install myself as president. The idea to do a big South American tour had been in our minds for a long time. But Queen on the road is not just the band, it involves a vast number of people and costs a lot of money for us to tour. In the end we said, “Fuck the cost, darlings, let’s live a little!”

Freddie Mercury

People in our industry all desperately want to be loved. We’re all insecure little show-offs. We make it look fab, we entertain people to the best of our abilities. We make it look like we know what we’re doing. But we’re paddling about like ducks on crack underneath.

Francis Rossi

H
aving conquered
five of six possible continents (there being a negligible rock following in Antarctica), only South America remained uncharted territory. False rumors that the best-selling, most hysterically worshipped band in Argentina and Brazil were planning to tour there had been doing the rounds for years. A handful of artists had ventured that far south before, including Earth, Wind & Fire and Peter
Frampton, but never on the colossal scale that Queen had in mind. If it could be done to their exacting standards, in the finest football stadia those countries had to offer, then game on. Thanks to soccer’s all but religious status in South America, there was no shortage of suitable venues. If the World Cup was the most widely viewed sporting event on earth, Queen were the planet’s top rock act. This was 1981, and Freddie was in his thirty-fifth year.

Many well-placed Argentinians stood to make fortunes from the Queen tour. José Rota was appointed chief promoter. Influential businessman Alfredo Capalbo agreed fixtures at the Vélez Sarsfield, Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata’s municipal stadium, and at the stadium of a soccer team called Atletico Rosario Central. The band were delighted with these World Cup venues and considered them more than appropriate.

After all, as Brian told me, “A Queen audience is a football crowd which doesn’t take sides.”

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In the run-up to their so-called South America Bites the Dust excursion, Freddie flew to New York with Peter Freestone to finalize the purchase of his apartment. It was a welcome relief on his wallet: $1,000-a-night hotel suites were an extravagance, even to Freddie, when he would stay for up to three months at a time. His magnificent forty-third-floor residence boasted panoramic north-south views.

“I remember how excited Freddie got during the New York celebrations for the hundredth anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge,” recalled Peter Freestone.

“We watched simultaneously from his balcony and on television. The apartment had belonged to a senator or a congressman called Gray. Freddie had bought it from his widow. The whole place was decorated in gray: four bedrooms, five bathrooms, and the den, all covered in gray material of the kind used to make men’s business suits. The dining room walls were lined with silvery satin. Although one of Freddie’s great passions was redesigning and redecorating his properties, he left that place exactly as it was.”

While Freddie was sorting his East Coast residence, forty tons of rigging, lighting, and sound equipment was making its way by ship from the United States to Rio de Janeiro, to be installed ahead of Queen’s historic concerts. Twenty tons more were transported on a specially chartered DC8 on the world’s longest city-to-city flight, from Tokyo to Buenos Aires.

When the band landed in Buenos Aires in searing 80-degree heat on 24 February 1981, they understood for the first time what a “heroes’ welcome” was about. They had known adulation in their time—not least in Tokyo. But not even the Japanese could match this. Since the day their government-endorsed tour was announced, the media had been Queen-crazy. In the days preceding their arrival, fans began flooding into the capital in their tens of thousands. On the day itself, it seemed as though all of them had converged on the airport at once. Also there to greet them was a presidential delegation and a police escort. The day’s proceedings received nonstop live coverage on national television. Even Freddie was speechless.